Trump now on a fast track to Nazism!

By Donald A. Collins | 28 August 2025
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

Anyone who has had the opportunity to read the August 28 article by Heather Cox Richardson will learn that once a dictator gets into power there is nothing that can be done to remove his regime until it is over as in the case of Nazism and Italy under Mussolini.

Richardson points out that the only way to stop such a dictator ship is to act before it becomes fully ensconced.

She points out that he is moving rapidly toward making reversal impossible.

In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said ‘We’ve hired him’ in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could ‘control’ or ‘moderate’ Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said ‘both sides are bad.’ America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been ‘very concerned’ for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just…accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

Finland 1932 is the only clean win I can find. The fascist Lapua Movement tried an armed coup before they’d secured government power. The military stayed loyal to democracy, crushed the rebellion, and banned the movement. That’s it. That’s the success story. One time out of roughly fifty attempts, fascists were stopped because they were stupid enough to try violence before winning elections.

Now we find in the Wall Street Journal, which, of course has been strongly in support of conservative causes and written a sharp account of what has been happening so far under the Trump second term.

Counsel Donald McGahn warned against trying to influence Justice Department investigations; and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke out about efforts to strip the Federal Reserve of its independence.

Bryan Lanza, a lobbyist and Trump ally, said “there is no longer anyone standing behind Trump waving off what he’s saying.” Lanza said the staff in this White House wants to follow what Trump says, not try and change him. “There were lots of debates in Trump 1.0 about what he should do and what he couldn’t do,” Lanza said. “He’s just executing this time.”

Trump wants to be at the White House more frequently this term, blaring music with doors of the Oval Office open, working later into the evening and telling his advisers that he is having fun. He has regaled aides with tales of how miserable he was during parts of the first term, as he battled with staff members and faced investigations.

At the time, he complained often about the Kennedy Center, the Federal Reserve, the National Security Council, and the Defense and Justice departments, but did little to actually shape them, former administration officials said, and seemed to accept there were limits on his power. He then showed little interest in taking on universities and law firms who were perceived as liberal, the officials said.

You can read that full account right here.

Bearing in mind the outrageous danger of this text above we can only hope that a sufficient number of uninformed verdict voters will realize that wealthy extreme right wing billionaires like Peter Thiel who has so influenced JD Vance against the idea of democracy even though they despise Trump are moving away from anything close to a democracy and we must act in concert with all those who believe as we do that this is the most major attack on our democracy since it was founded 250 years ago.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 60 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?”, “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”, “Common Sense: When will Trump be Impeached, Indicted, and Exited?” and “Trump–unrestrained dangerous liar!”.

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